The Maladaptive Imperium

The liberal-capitalist system isn't adapted for humans. But a Christian culture could be

Humans are a cultural animal. Or better, we’re the cultural animal. Other creatures depend on razor-sharp teeth, claws, advanced musculature, wings. We have culture. Our most important skills, like using complex tools, baking bread, or dealing with money, all have to be learned. We don’t come prepackaged with instincts for them. So we omnivorously devour cultural knowledge as children, picking up our parents’ language and making it our own, becoming natives of a particularistic cultural world, absorbing its skills and values. A Lakota boy learns the Lakota language, Lakota mythology, Lakota hunting techniques. A Greek girl learns Greek language and stories, how to hold herself like a Greek girl. An American child learns…whatever it is that American culture teaches. (More on that fraught question in a moment.)

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So the world is chock-full of different cultures, each adapted in different ways to their varying contexts. 20th- and 21st-century liberalism taught that each and every one of these cultures has equal intrinsic worth. This was the Coke commercial version of multiculturalism, where everyone gets along together in a consumerist paradise. But — trigger warning — in the real world, there’s an important sense in which cultures aren’t all equal: some survive and some don’t. The norms, laws, technologies, and values that define any given culture can be more or less adaptive. Maladaptive cultures tend to dissolve into the sands of time.

It might seem that we Westerners are living in one of the winning cultures, what with our plumbing and Teslas and vaccines. But in a fascinating recent article in Quillette, the economist Robin Hanson argues that our culture — the worldwide liberal-capitalist culture that American supremacy and world trade has spawned — is actually heading in a very maladaptive direction. Exhibit A is the puzzling collapse in fertility that’s plaguing virtually all developed countries.

Environmentalists might cheer, but a lack of young people threatens to cause a lot of difficult social, economic, and political problems. And more topically, societies that fail to reproduce themselves are, by definition, not winners in the competitive cultural game. (There are also many other signs that our current culture is maladaptive; I’ll get to some of these below.)

Not only is our liberal-capitalist culture maladaptive, but it doesn’t have many corrective influences to get it back on track. Throughout most of human history, Hanson writes, maladaptive cultures would either fix themselves or get weeded out pretty quickly, for the essentially the same reason that species go extinct when outcompeted by other species. But now, because our particular (if that word makes sense here) culture is global and near-universal, there are fewer pressures keeping it in line. Lack of serious competition is perversely allowing us to enter a state of directionless cultural “drift,” where innovations and changes to our norms and values sort of randomly stack up, pushing us in increasingly non-helpful directions without anyone intending it.

Cultural Evolution Is Not Messing Around

This supposition borrows from pseudo-Darwinian cultural evolution, in which the most “fit” human groups — those with the most adaptive or helpful norms and practices — survive over time and outcompete others.¹ This intercultural competition doesn’t necessarily have to involve military conflict (although it often does). It could easily just mean that one society slowly dies out while another one blithely moves in to occupy its former territories.

In this never-ending struggle for cultural survival, differences in norms and practices can mean the difference between success and oblivion.

For example, imagine two neighboring agrarian societies, call them the Grays and the Purples, whose religious practices (like those of virtually all societies) involve making sacrifices to their respective gods. At first, the two societies have about the same populations, the same birthrates, the same (fairly high but sustainable) death rates. Both the Grays and the Purples seem to offer their young members about equal chances of success in life.²

But somewhere along the line, the Grays fall into destructive intra-elite competition. Wealthy Grays start feeling compelled to flaunt their prosperity by burning more and more of it on the sacrificial altars, each trying to outdo the others in a kind of inverted potlatch. The whole thing devolves into a status-signaling trap. Soon, an unsustainably large proportion of the Grays’ livestock, grain, and other goods are literally going up in smoke, not so much out of religious piety but out of elite status anxiety. Economic expansion eventually grinds to a halt; young men start finding it difficult to build up enough resources to attract spouses and start families. Bereft of economic opportunity and suspecting that their religion — which should be a unifying force — is somehow to blame, people begin turning sullen, trusting each other less, withdrawing from participation in the society’s rites and festivals. The birthrate declines. The death rate trends upward.

The Purples, meanwhile, are doing just fine. They continue to devote a reasonable proportion of their resources to religious sacrifice, which is overall adaptive because it helps bond the community by establishing a shared system of beliefs and traditions, increasing overall trust (within the tribe, at least) and reducing transaction costs for everything from arranging marriages to buying land. These well-calibrated religious practices also deter potential free riders from sticking around, thus encouraging widespread cooperation and engendering buy-in. Purple society is humming along.

The birth and death rates for Purples are now only a few percentage points better than those of the less-adaptive Grays, but as the decades go by, the principle of compound interest kicks in. “Gradually, then suddenly,” the Purples overtake their neighbors, becoming the dominant power in the area.

Farmers from the richer, more powerful Purples start buying up the Grays’ increasingly vacant farmland, moving into territories formerly protected by the Grays’ now-insignificant military. The Grays eventually, and inevitably, drift toward becoming a vassal state of the Purples. The youngest, most ambitious and promising young Grays start flocking to the Purples’ capital, where they adopt Purple cultural values and begin to marry eligible Purple bachelors and bachelorettes, who frankly seem a lot more attractive than the impoverished, washed-out Gray rubes back home. The Purple language quickly becomes the prestige language throughout the region, taught even in schools back in the Gray heartlands.

By the time a century or two has gone by, Gray society is gone — completely absorbed into Purple society or dwindled into a remnant. All that’s left is a few loanwords from the Grays’ now-extinct language and mutated place names on Purple maps.

The Imperium Is Now Everywhere

This example is obviously a massive oversimplification, and a pollyanna-ish one too, because it skips over the military conquest, oppression, and pillaging that so often accompany a powerful culture’s eclipse of a comparatively weaker one. In real life, the expansion of Purples into Gray territory probably included plenty of violence and shameful conduct that would be prosecutable under UN law. (It’s also a quite politically incorrect story, because it doesn’t ride on the assumption that the more-powerful society is always 100% to blame, morally, for competitively edging out another, but let’s let that lie for now.)

The point is that sometimes — perhaps often — societies grow competitively weaker for reasons that are internal to themselves. This is what Hanson means when he says that maladaptive cultural values and practices usually don’t last too long. If your society strips all its topsoil, mismanages its resources, and sacrifices unsustainable numbers of children to flesh-hungry gods, it probably just won’t compete very well against other groups with better topsoil practices and a less abjectly terrorized populace. This helps explain how Cortez was able to conquer the seemingly mighty Aztec Empire with a ragtag band of Spanish conquistadores: a lot of the Aztec subjects, tired of the bloodthirsty Aztec regime, just joined the Spaniards to help topple it.

Maladaptive practices and beliefs often perish alongside their host society. This is tough for the defeated people, but maybe not so tragic for humanity as a whole, because now future societies won’t be contaminated by those destructive behavioral memes. How many mass human sacrifices to the sun god are going on in Mexico today?

But here we are now, in the 21st century, in a giant worldwide society (seemingly) without viable competitors to provide a check on its excesses. Sure, there are isolated tribes and cultures here and there, in forgotten corners of the earth, eking out livings comparatively disconnected from the global market economy. But these societies don’t pose a serious economic, military, or even cultural threat to the global liberal-democratic American imperium. Very few of our young people run off to go live as natives among Afghani tribespeople. It’s very hard to defect from the imperium. Every direction you look, there it is: a borderless neoliberal market society with increasingly homogeneous, capitalism-enhancing values such as cosmopolitanism, expressive individualism, and gender interchangeability.

Which means that our errors, if we have any, are liable to start stacking up. Maladaptive practices and values could be gumming up our works without our even noticing it, because we lack sufficient competition to reveal our weaknesses. We might be a globe-spanning technocratic empire, but in many ways we’re like an airplane flying through soupy clouds without instrumentation: we lack real-time feedback to tell us whether we’re maintaining a safe course. There might be a mountain right up ahead, and we won’t know until we smack into it.

Warning Signals

Thankfully, this analogy isn’t quite accurate. A few instruments are still functioning. Unfortunately, though, their readouts aren’t encouraging. Something like 200,000 Americans die per year from suicide, alcohol, or drug overdoses — the so-called deaths of despair. Millions of us are falling victim to drug addictions, facilitated by the easy spread of narco-synthetics like fentanyl across our inconsistently regulated borders. More and more of the economy seems to be built on wealth extraction and activities that, because of their addictive natures, used to be called vice. We’re suffering from an epidemic of loneliness and breakdown of community so severe that the U.S. Surgeon General issued a warning about it.

But that’s just America. The signals elsewhere in the imperium are similarly concerning. As Hanson points out, all across the capitalist world (in which I include non-liberal but highly market-integrated countries such as supposedly Communist China), birthrates are plummeting to unheard-of levels, far below the rate of replacement. This is a tremendous anomaly in the history of humanity, something we have no precedent for.

Relatedly, a massive cultural rift is opening between young men and women, with values and political orientations drifting so far apart that it’s making it hard for teens and twenty-somethings to find romantic partners. Men are becoming more conservative and anti-feminist; women are becoming fiercely liberal. In Korea, where many young women have decided to foreswear men entirely, the problem has gotten so bad that it’s helped the number of children per woman fall to far less than one, which Free Press writer Anna Louie Sussman macabrely observes is a “a figure rarely seen outside wartime.”

The Global Liberal Civilization Looks Like a Bad Bet

Maybe you think falling birthrates are a problem and maybe you don’t, but from the perspective of young people starting out in life, it’s a major signal — even if an unconsciously processed one — that the society they find themselves inhabiting is becoming a really bad bet. It means the society is maladaptive. So do signs of mass suicide and mental illness, pathological loneliness, and gridlocked impasse between men and women. Overall, the norms and institutions that define global liberal society just aren’t working to help people with the most biologically, psychologically, and spiritually crucial tasks of all: establishing communities, finding meaning, creating new life.

If a society can’t do these things, then its combination of norms is memetic kryptonite. It can’t survive.

There’s a truism that goes like this: if a zoo provides its animals with good habitats, the animals will reproduce on their own. That’s the yardstick for zoos to measure their success. If your bears aren’t bothering to breed, you probably haven’t given them an environment that’s suitable for bears.

Well, similarly, if your humans aren’t pairing off and having kids, your society probably isn’t adapted very well for, well, humans. Something has gone seriously wrong with the code.³

Put simply, our norms aren’t working. They’re tuned for something other than humans. Maybe that something is liberal capitalism itself, which, while (ideally) serving human interests, is not itself human and which tends to colonize the lifeworld, as Habermas put it. Or maybe they’re becoming increasingly adapted for the techno-utopia our Silicon Valley nobility is endlessly trying to foist on us, which unambiguously prioritizes machines over people. Or maybe these are more or less the same thing.

Or maybe, as Robin Hanson suggests, the global liberal-capitalist cultural system isn’t really adapted or optimized for anything. It’s just increasingly the product of random drift, of innovations and advertising, of separate groups of activists bending various institutions to their conflicting and often incoherent wills. Scale it all up, and you get a collection of norms and values that don’t fit very well together and certainly don’t support human thriving. But as I said above, the imperium is everywhere. Without some version of Cortez on the horizon, it seems that we’re stuck with the maladaptive norms we’ve got.

Competition

This is where the Church comes in. A theme of this newsletter has been (or at least I hope it’s been) the ways in which a genuinely Christian culture might provide realistic alternatives to a liberal, American-driven society that’s rapidly losing its ability to command anyone’s loyalty. I’ve written before that most of our formerly prestigious institutions — especially but not only elite universities — have become increasingly cringe, and I’m not the only one who thinks so.

Now, the next thing I have to say might not sound very Christian. And strictly speaking, it’s not. It’s an informed take based on a slurry of insights from cultural evolution, human behavioral ecology, and other human sciences concerned with culture. I’m not ready to go to bat for it yet, scientifically. But bear with me, and I hope you’ll see why I’m including it.

Part of the cringe reaction toward contemporary institutions is the affective output of cognitive algorithms that assess how adaptive our society is.

These algorithms ensure that we take a shine to groups and organizations that are thriving, because joining or committing to them might help us thrive, too. Conversely, sick groups tend to repel us, because they’ll probably make us “sick,” too, if we stick around them. Our gut feelings — that impressed warmish feeling of “Wow, these guys are legit, I respect them,” or that lip-curling cringe that says “These guys suck, I need to avoid them” — are heuristic guides to help us make good bets in life. They help us choose good groups to join, good spouses to marry, good institutions to commit to.

So it’s truly remarkable and destabilizing that so many of our world-shaping institutions have recently slithered from the former category into the latter. I don’t know about you, but my gut feeling about a lot of formerly trusted institutions has shifted dramatically over the past few years. They just don’t seem like good bets anymore.

I think a lot of people are feeling the same way. Maybe trust in institutions is falling now because maladaptive cultural drift finally caught up with us. Or maybe, as many postliberals argue, it’s because inherent contradictions within liberal modernity have inevitably broken to the surface.

Provide a Real Alternative

Regardless of why institutional trust has plummeted, the way forward for Christianity should be obvious: provide a reasonable alternative for a culture that’s going sour. Of course, this is really just recycling an idea with a lot of currency. Eastern Orthodox commentator Rod Dreher advocates for a Benedict Option, where Christians turn away from supporting the mainstream culture and focus instead on rebuilding their own culture and worldview. Andy Crouch, a Protestant thinker, has called for Christians to return to culture-making in a more hands-on way.

People disagree about whether, in pursuing the renaissance of Christian culture, believers should embrace countercultural marginalization or try to re-conquer the commanding heights of culture. Fortunately for me, I don’t need to take a stand on this controversial question. Regardless whether Christians become a truly despised counterculture or somehow claw our way back into majority status (unlikely), the same task presents itself: creating a culture that works for human beings and which can compete successfully against the anti-culture of the imperium.

Let me offer three quick examples of how Christian culture might do this.

First, mainstream liberal-capitalist culture can’t seem to help young people reconcile the perennial tensions between the sexes well enough to facilitate getting hitched and having kids. But these things are a major biological imperative as well as an important spiritual goal for most people. A lot of Christian saints have been celibate, but the majority of normal people will always want the default joys of sex, intimacy, and children. Christian culture doesn’t have to be perfect at helping people find these things. It just has do better than the secular culture around it. Frankly, this shouldn’t be hard.

Second, the liberal-capitalist imperium wants people to submit to a culture of what Josef Pieper called total work. Everything, but everything, is convertible into quantifiable capital, into legible value. Efficiency is inscribed into every decision, every policy. This ends up eroding once-sacred values and organic human connections. As Marx wrote, “all that is solid melts into air.”

Well, historical Christianity centers on a rite that is, as Pieper pointed out, completely useless. We gather together in a church, which historically was opulently decorated (and often still is, although there are exceptions), to sing songs and burn incense and hear words written 2,000 years ago, capped off by partaking of a meal that’s not really a meal. This isn’t total work; it’s sabbath. Instead of producing economic value, we sacrifice it — literally burning it up and consuming it, not stupidly like the Grays, but generatively, like the Purples. By simply leaning into this timeless aspect of itself, essentially centered on divine play, Christianity can offer sabbath to those who are in desperate need of it.

Thirdly, the imperium is utopian, demanding that we solve social problems once and for all by remaking human nature in a rational image. This quickly devolves into technocratic sloganeering. We’re supposed to eliminate racism and eradicate discrimination; we aim for a world where we’ve solved the climate crisis and achieved universal equity. It’s a drumbeat of constant reform.

But while racism is clearly an evil to be combatted, insisting that we eliminate it is a fool’s errand. This way of thinking doesn’t allow for tradeoffs. At its extremes, it becomes positively anti-human, since no matter what efforts we make, people remain stubbornly prone to racism, and human economic activity always has ecological costs. We can’t solve the problems of the world; we can only deal with them.

But the imperium wants utopia. When utopia inevitably fails to appear, it blames people. The broken nature of the world isn’t the problem; recalcitrant, backward people are. So it starts seeking ways to force human nature to change or, as we’re seeing in certain fanatical transhumanist circles in Silicon valley, to replace it with something better. Filtering down from our elites, this vicious utopianism makes us feel that we’re living in a zoo enclosure that’s not designed for our species. That’s because we’re not: we’re living in an enclosure designed for whatever the utopians want us to become, or plan to replace us with. Christian culture should, ideally, be able to provide a better, more humane way of thinking about human nature and human problems.

Again, it really shouldn’t be hard to even marginally outcompete the imperium on this front. It’s a low bar. We can start with the Imago Dei: human beings as the image of God, something inexpressibly sacred in themselves.

Christianity should be inherently good at combining the Imago Dei with realism. With its central doctrine of original sin, Christianity has always expected there to be racists and murderers and exploitation. In fact, it teaches that every one of us could easily be those things if we’re not careful. Original sin might sound bleak, but in fact it frees Christian culture to accept real humans exactly as they are, which is flawed, often self-centered language-using organisms trying to scape out a living stuck to the sides of a whirling planet where death is certain, but which nevertheless always explodes with beauty. It lets Christianity cut us some slack while also holding us to transcendently high standards. Yes, humans will always tend toward racism. But that doesn’t mean it’s okay for you to be racist as a Christian. Christian culture should lean into this anti-utopian aspect of its patrimony, hard.

Towards an Adaptive Christian Culture

We need a culture that cuts us some slack. One that’s adapted for humans, not machines grinding forever in total work. One that helps men and women find each other, get along decently well despite their differences, and make families who will carry the flame down the centuries. As the bigger culture around us whirls toward some sort of potentially massive crack-up, we don’t actually have to accept living in a declining civilization with screwed-up, maladaptive norms. We can start building a competitor culture with completely different norms, right under the empire’s nose.

Of course, this means being willing to stop following the imperium’s lead. It could mean some losing respect, prestige, and status within the mainstream society. This prospect is particularly hard for smart people with good university educations who are understandably ambitious — the people journalist Chris Arnade calls “front row kids.” But with so many of the imperium’s institutions becoming terminally cringe, maybe losing status within them won’t be such a tragedy. Seeking a way out of a culture that’s dying, even front row kids might sniff out the fact that Christian culture is living.

The Christian counterculture’s practices and values might look strange at first to eyes accustomed to the liberalized, universal-lite habits and practices of the decaying empire. But those eyes will also be able to discern something else: this strange, 2,000-year-old culture isn’t just different and weird. It’s also looking like a pretty good bet.

1. Of course, there’s a lot of debate about whether competition between groups actually resembles Darwinian selection. In part, this debate stems from deeper disagreement about whether selection can even happen between groups at all. For the purposes of this essay, let’s just acknowledge that, in the real world, societies clearly compete against each other. It might be just be a heuristic truth, but it’s true nonetheless.

2. With success measured in terms such as likelihood of having a family and leaving behind descendants, not dying of plague or starvation in your twenties, not getting slaughtered by marauding hordes, etc. This means that a successful culture has to provide basic existential security guarantees, including offering its people a decent shot at having a family. This latter point is key.

3. Although, actually, it’s pretty hard to get zoo animals to breed in captivity. Maybe we’re just suffering from self-domestication taken much too far, perhaps to the point of (especially in large metropolises) self-captivity. To a guy like me, raised in rural America but living now in a large city, this sounds plausible.